Tag Archives: 1965

Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1965] Plus C'est La Même Chose (February 1965 Galaxy)

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[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine!  We work for egoboo…]


by Gideon Marcus

Things in Flux

I read an article yesterday about how America was retiring all of its first-generation nuclear missiles, the hundreds of Thors, Jupiters, Atlas Ds, Es, Fs, and Titan Is.  It's astonishing when you think how short their operational lifespan was.  The first Atlas D base came online in 1959; the first Titans were activated in 1962!  Yet there they go, replaced by just two types: the solid-fueled Minutemen and the liquid-fueled Titan IIs, both of which can be launched straight from atom-proof silos. 

It reminds me of the big science fiction magazine boom at the end of the 1940s.  After the War, Amazing and Astounding were among the few genre mags remaining in publication after the big pulp bust.  But around the turn of the decade, Fantasy and Science Fiction came about, and New Worlds and Galaxy…and the floodgates were opened.  By 1953, there were some forty magazines in more-or-less regular production.

Well, there wasn't enough talent to fill those pages, and probably not enough readers either (I remember struggling to keep up with seven mags in 1957), and by the end of the '50s, we were back down to six.  That number has grown a bit since then, but it's nothing like the old "glory days".

Even the magazines that still exist have changed substantially.  Astounding changed its name to Analog and went "slick".  F&SF is now on its fourth editor, and the quality of its contents is markedly diminished since last decade.  Amazing and its '50s born sister, Fantastic, not only got new management under Cele Goldsmith, but she recently got married and changed her name to Cele Lalli!

But Galaxy, my favorite since its establishment in October 1950, seems virtually unchanged.  Sure, it went to bimonthly in 1959, it's a little thicker, a little more expensive.  Fred Pohl, one of the magazine's primary contributors, now runs the show.

Nevertheless, Willy Ley still does the science column, the contents are still more thoughtful than technical (though less toward the extreme than F&SF), and the names remain familiar: Cordwainer Smith.  J.T. McIntosh.  James H. Schmitz.  Robert Silverberg (though he was in short-pants when the magazine first started.)

And quality-wise, I think it's still, pound-for-pound, the best sf mag on the market.  Is it perfect?  Hardly, but always worth a subscription.  Check out the February 1965 edition, and tell me if you don't agree.

An Island of Stability


A fascinating cover by newcomer "Wright" — it's not connected with any of the stories, as is common for Galaxy.

On the Storm Planet, by Cordwainer Smith

The neat thing about Smith's Instrumentality series, detailing an odd far future, is that it has been around long enough to have a near infinite number of plot threads.  In Storm Planet, we are reintroduced to Casher O'Neill, an exile from the planet Mizzer, who had previously searched for aid and arms on a planet of jewels.  Now, he has come to Henriada, a tempest of a world where cyclones run amok, and where once 600 million lived, just 40,000 remain — deterred by economic failure in the distant past. 


by Virgil Finlay

Upon arriving, Casher is offered a powerful cruiser by the planet's Administrator.  The price?  Casher must kill a girl.

Not just any girl.  She is an underperson, a rightsless animal shaped into human guise to be a servant.  Yet, somehow she is the most powerful person on the planet, someone who has resisted countless assassination attempts.

Who T'ruth really is, and why she holds such sway, are the central mysteries of this excellent novella, to which I find I must award five stars.

A Flask of Fine Arcturan, by C. C. MacApp

An interstellar whiskey company has a rather spectacular failure when the aliens responsible for the bottling go on an unplanned jag.  A cautionary tale against poor interdepartmental company communications, this epistolary is something of a throwaway.  Barely three stars.

Forerunners of the Planetarium, by Willy Ley

If you're of my generation, you grew up during the great planetarium boom, when every educational facility of merit was getting its own interior star chamber.  And over the last two decades, they've gotten cheap and portable enough that they're practically everywhere now.

Willy Ley does his usual competent job of explaining the origin of the planetarium and its ancestors, the orrery, the armilla, and the astronomical clock.

Four stars.

The Sixth Palace, by Robert Silverberg

The greatest treasure in the galaxy is guarded by a clever robot who, sphinxlike, demands correct answers to its questions.  Two men believe they have an ace up their sleeve that will let them prevail where others have failed: a little computer that knows everything.

Can it be that simple?

There's not much to this tale, but it's told very well.  Four stars, I think.

The Man Who Killed Immortals, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gary Morrow

McIntosh has already written about immortality, in his excellent Immortality for Some from five years ago.  This time, he adds an interesting twist.

Several hundred years from now, a costly operation enables those who undergo it to live forever — unaging, unchanging.  But the downside is enormous: they are unable to heal from any wounds.  These "elsies" (for LC or Living Corpse) accumulate great wealth, but they mostly use it to cocoon themselves in exquisite safety.

But someone who calls himself The Avenger, wants to change the status quo.  He's begun demanding millions of dollars of elsies lest he slice their vulnerable skin.

A fairly unremarkable whodunnit, it lacks the deep interest of his last story of immortals.  Three stars.

Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer, by Richard Wilson

Mr. Protagonist sells mental taps on four astronauts so that the American population can vicariously experience the first Mars Landing.  Unforseen events interfere.

This joke tale falls pretty flat, though I did appreciate this line:

The Marsbound astronauts…each had an I.Q. no lower than 130 and no higher than 146 (the NASA director's I.Q. was 147).

Two stars.

Fin's Funeral, by Donald H. Menzel

Frederick I. "Fin" Nolan is a brilliant physicist who passes away at the age of 68, just after coming up with a theoretical way to reverse the passage of time (something to do with Steady State expansion of the universe).  His will includes the curious request that his coffin be left sealed, and that, at his funeral, the dials on it be set just so.

I'm pretty sure you can guess what happens.  It's a pretty prosaic story, the sort of thing I'd expect of a first-timer who hasn't been reading our genre for decades.

(Interestingly, I understand the fellow is actually a brilliant theoretical astronomer — his nonfiction is probably pretty good; Funeral isn't badly written, just novice plot material.  Also, I'll put good money down that that the Steady Staters are going to lose to the Big Bangers.  Any takers?

Two stars.

Planet of Forgetting, by James H. Schmitz


by Jack Gaughan

Last up is a piece by an old pro.  Schmitz is inclined to storytell through exposition, which suits this first-person thriller.  It starts intriguingly enough, with a special agent awakening on a wilderness planet with only gradually returning memory of how he got there.  The novelette then meanders through a workmanlike adventure story of no particular interest, but the interesting ending brings things back into three-star territory. 

All's Right in the Galaxy

As you can see, Galaxy is amazingly consistent.  Any of these stories would have been suited to any of the issues over the last 15 years of publication.  I'd worry about stagnation, but with a 3.5 star aggregate rating, I don't mind things remaining as they are for a while.

Analog and F&SF, however…they could afford a little change!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 4, 1965] Madness: 2, Sanity: 1 (January Galactoscope)

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[January's edition of the Galactoscope offers three novels in two books.  Be warned — there's madness afoot!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

Now that you've got the Doublemint Gum jingle running through your head, allow me to explain my reason for annoying you. The Ace Double Series has been going for more than a decade, offering two novels in one. Two short novels, to be sure; some are really novellas. Others are short story collections, as we'll see in today's review. The pair of mini-books are bound in what the printing industry calls dos-a-dos. (Sounds like a square dancing term to me.) That is, each half of the volume is upside down, compared to the other half. Sometimes both parts are by the same writer, sometimes not.

Let's take a look at Ace Double M-109, featuring G. C. Edmondson's first novel, as well as several briefer pieces from the same pen.

Mister Edmondson or Señor Edmondson y Cotton?

I can come up with no better way to introduce the author than by allowing him to speak for himself, in the blurb that comes with the book in question.

I don't know how seriously to take all of that, but it certainly makes for interesting reading. I hope the novel (yes, I'll get around to it eventually) proves to be at least as fascinating.

Appetizers Before the Main Course


Cover art by Jack Gaughan

Stranger Than You Think is a collection of all the Mad Friend stories that have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to date. Because our Noble Host has already reviewed these tales, I won't go into detail.

Suffice to say that they all feature the narrator and his Mad Friend in rural Mexico, and deal with time travel, alien probes, reincarnation, and such things. The tone is very light, and the stories are about ten percent plot and ninety percent local color. They remind me, a bit, of R. A. Lafferty and Avram Davidson. In general, the series is inoffensive but forgettable.

The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream


Also by Gaughan

I told you I'd get around to it.

Our hero is Ensign Joseph Rate, commander of the good ship Alice, a unique vessel in the United States Navy of the modern era. You see, Alice is a wooden sailing ship, although she also has a diesel engine for emergency use. The idea is that she can engage in countermeasures against enemy submarines without making sounds that would reveal her position.

At the moment, Alice is engaged in testing new equipment, requiring the presence of an elderly meteorologist and his young assistant. Unknown to his motley crew, Rate is also supposed to investigate criminal activities aboard her.

All of this fades into insignificance, when lighting strikes Alice at the same time the ship's cook is messing around with a new way to distill illicit booze. (Believe it or not, this plays an important part in the plot.)

Full Speed Backwards

If you've read the title of the novel, it won't come as a big surprise to discover that Alice gets zapped back in time a millennium or so, as well as leaving the warm ocean area near San Diego for colder waters, somewhere between Ireland and Iceland. A battle with a Viking raider ensues, followed by a slightly less violent meeting with a merchant ship. Among the cargo she's carrying is a Spanish Gypsy, enslaved by the Norsemen. She winds up aboard Alice, and serves as the novel's main source of sex appeal. Besides that, she's also clever and a tough cookie, so I'll give the author some credit for that.

Here We Go Again

Skipping over most of the first half of the novel, we reach a point where Rate tries to duplicate the circumstances that led to this situation. This doesn't work out very well, because Alice doesn't return to her home, but instead jumps back another thousand years, and winds up somewhere in the Mediterranean.

After encountering Arab slave traders who temporarily take control of Alice, the time travelers eventually wind up on a rocky island, populated by goats and several naked young women, who are more than willing to supply the crew with plenty of wine and other carnal pleasures. There's an explanation for what seems like a sailor's fantasy, which involves another inadvertent visitor from the future, this time the madame of a brothel/speakeasy in 1920's Chicago.

A lot more happens before we reach the end of the novel, including battles with Roman warships and the misadventures of the only religious fanatic aboard Alice, a male virgin who finds himself in intimate situations with more than one alluring lady.

Worth the Voyage?

Although it's impossible to take the novel's version of time travel seriously, the plot doesn't stop for a second, always keeping the reader's interest. As you may have guessed, there's quite a bit of sexual content, which tends to be more teasing than explicit. There's also a lot of violence, given the constant attacks on Alice by just about every vessel that meets her.

The tone of the book ranges from darkly comic to intensely dramatic, with a bit of satire in the form of the religious fanatic. This character may raise some eyebrows among readers of faith, although his version of Christianity is clearly of the extremist variety. The ending raises the possibility of a sequel, but whether such a book will ever appear is up to the tides of time.

Three stars.

A Little Mental Illness for the New Year (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich by Philip K. Dick)


by Jason Sacks

This is the fourth Philip K. Dick novel released in the last several months, and I’ve read them all. Clearly science fiction’s most surrealistic writer is in the midst of an unusually fecund period, one in which his astounding fiction seems channeled directly from the writer’s brain onto the printed page. And while that unfiltered creativity makes for fascinating reading, Dick’s latest fiction shows him to be wrestling with some intense personal issues, including dislocation and mental health concerns.

Those recent works (The Penultimate Truth, The Clans of the Alphane Moon, Martian Time-Slip and his most recently published novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich) share a lot in common with each other. All three books demonstrate a mind in constant motion, continually distracted and probing, with ideas seeming to spark from every page in a cascade which starts out as thrilling, becomes tiring, and ultimately proves to be overwhelming. Ideas, interesting and odd, bonkers and basic, philosophical and dully grounded, seem to flow from Mr. Dick as freely as the sweat which constantly seems to be on the foreheads of each and every one of his neurotic protagonists.

Eldrich starts from a template similar to his Dick’s other novels. Most Dick novels feature a neurotic protagonist, and this book is no exception. This time he is named Barney Mayerson and he is a wealthy man in a low-numbered conapt building (a major sign of status) with a great job as the New York Pre-Fash consultant at influential company P.P. Layouts. But Mayerson has problems – oh nellie does he have problems. As the book begins, the businessman wakes up with a hangover, a strange woman in his bed and, most frightening of all, a draft notice which will cause the UN to send him to Mars. That sounds like the beginning of a film noir, but as we follow Mayerson, he slips into a different sort of darkness than the doomed protagonists of our darkest films.

To help him escape the draft, Barney has purchased a robot named Dr. Smile, intended to help Mayerson avoid the draft by making him even more neurotic than he seems. But even the robot isn’t perfect; it calls him by the wrong name and doesn’t seem to pay close attention to Barney, adding to the seemingly endless list of degrading events Barney experiences in the first few pages — and far from the final humiliation he experiences in the book.

Like so many lead characters in recent Dick novels – poor doomed Norbert Steiner in Time-Slip and lovelorn, oblivious Chuck Rittersdorf in Alphane pop immediately to mind – Barney Mayerson is a confused man. He is neurotic, uncertain, perhaps mentally ill. He has tremendous problems relating to the women most important to him, especially his wife. He even gives up all hope of avoiding the draft and instead volunteers to go to Mars, simply to get away from a source of tangled neurotic pain. It is tough to spend time with Steiner, Rittersdorf or Mayerson, because they are so uncertain of themselves despite their apparent success. These are so conscious of their own flaws, their own massive insecurities, that we can understand why these feel rejected by the worlds which surround them. As readers, we want to reject them as well, want to follow characters with some measure of self-assurance, like Trade Minister Tagomi in Dick’s 1963 masterpiece The Man in the High Castle.

Taken one at a time, each of the recent Dick books provide an intriguing portrait of men whose own demons sabotage their own best aspirations. Seen together as a collection of books, it’s hard not to see some authorial autobiography flowing through these characters. After all, if Mr. Dick is writing his books so quickly, how can he avoid writing himself into his stories?

If we take that assertion as fact as part of my essay (and I would be delighted to hear counterarguments in the letters page), then Palmer Eldrich is the most frightening of all Dick’s novels so far. Because at its heart, and in the great thrust of its cataclysmic conclusion, is a break with peaceful reality that actually makes me worry about the author.

Without going too deep into the reasons why – part of the joy of this fascinating book lies in the ways Dick explores his shambolic but complex plot – Barney ends up on Mars and discovers that nearly all the Martian colonists are miserable and drug-addled. Their experience on Mars is so wretched and soul-crushing that only psychedelic drugs, shared among groups of colonists, provide a brief break from their mind-numbing lives.

Barney is responsible for helping a new drug to come to Mars, cleverly called Chew-Z, which promises better highs and more transcendent experiences. But as readers soon discover, the new drug also creates a schizophrenic experience, one in which the terrifying Palmer Eldrich comes to dominate Martian society – and much more – in a way that terrifies everyone who considers it. Eldrich is a terrifying creature, with steel teeth, a damaged arm, and an approach to the world which builds misery.

In truth, Barney Mayerson has unleashed a demon, and it’s not spoiling much in this book to say that by the end you will feel the same fear Barney and the rest of society begin to feel.

Eldrich, thus, is a deeply unsettling book, and fits Dick’s recent output in a way which makes me feel concerned for the author. It is the third out of the four recent novels to deal explicitly with mental illness (in fact, mental illness provides the central storyline of Alphane and a key secondary storyline in Martian Time-Slip). It’s intriguing that Dick sees in science fiction the opportunity to put the readers in the mindset of a man experiencing a schizophrenic break, a psychotic episode, or battling debilitating depression, but the continual presence of such ideas suggests a man whose life is also battling similar breaks.

If Mr. Dick is obsessed with mental illness, does he see that illness in himself when he looks in the mirror? And if we readers purchase Mr. Dick’s books in which mental illness takes a central role, are we aiding his therapy or abetting his continual wallowing?

Palmer Eldrich is not an easy book to read, not once it gets going and we start to realize the depths of Meyerson’s, and Dick’s problems. The plot ambles and wanders and is dense with philosophy and allusion. For a 200-page book, this is no quick Tarzan or Conan yarn. Instead, it is a deeply upsetting, deeply complex look into the disturbed psychology of both its lead character and its author. After consuming so many Dick novels all in succession, I’m craving something much lighter. Neuroses are exhausting.

4 stars




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Science / Space Race

[January 2, 1965] Say that again in English? (Talking to a Machine, Part Two)

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by Gideon Marcus

A Matter of Time

We are now in the latter half of the 1960s, and computers have become a fundamental part of our lives.  I previously discussed how computers are really quite simple, only understanding ones and zeroes.  And yet, with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of patience, a computer can be instructed ("programmed') to do almost anything.co

Patience is the operative word.  As we saw last time, when programming in a language the computer understands natively, it takes six lines of computer language ("code") to add two numbers, and thirty just to have the computer use the Pythagorean Theorem to determine the hypotenuse of a right triangle.  Can you imagine doing advanced trigonometry that way?  Simple calculus?  How about advanced calculus?

If you're a scientist, you probably know advanced mathematics, but it's unlikely that you have any idea how to write machine language code.  And given that every computer speaks its own version of machine language, you certainly couldn't be expected know how to speak to all of them in their native tongue. 

But if you've got a thorny problem to solve, and the math is too complex (or more importantly, time-consuming) for you to handle on your own, you've got to be able to use a computer.  At that point, given the tools we've got thus far, your only option would be to employ a human translator to convert your problem into something the computer can understand.

People like this don't grow on trees!  It's not as if there are freelance software programmers out there who will take a coding assignment like piecework.  Computer tenders are full-time personnel employed by the institution that bought the machine.  Their time is precious.  They can't afford to write thousands of lines of program code every time an egghead wants to run a Fourier Transformation.  Moreover, they probably aren't scientists: would a computer gnome even know linear algebra from a serial circuit?

What's needed is a machine to talk to the machine.

A Language is Born

In 1954, a ten-person team led by IBM engineer, John Backus, developed the first robot translator.  Backus wasn't interested in plane tickets or phone bills; he simply wanted it to be easier for scientists to run math equations on a computer.  Sophisticated business applications could come later.


John Backus


Lois Habit, the lone woman on the team

Backus' team created FORTRAN: Formula Translator.  And it sparked a revolution.

FORTRAN actually comprised two elements: a new programming language for humans and a robot middleman for the computer.

First, the language.  FORTRAN, like any language, has a grammar and a vocabulary.  There are dozens of words, all of them more or less recognizable to an English speaker, though their definitions are highly specific.  Also, they must be entered in a grammatically rigorous fashion for them to work. 

But once one gets the knack, its orders of magnitude easier to program in FORTRAN than machine language.  For example, last time, we saw it took six lines of code just to add two numbers, and we had to include the numbers as part of the program.  What if we wanted a general program to add any two numbers?

It'd look like this:

PROGRAM ADD

C This program will add two numbers

INTEGER FIRST, SECOND, TOTAL

10 FORMAT(I5)
20 FORMAT(I6)

READ (5,10) FIRST

READ (5,10) SECOND

TOTAL = FIRST + SECOND

WRITE (6,20) TOTAL

END

Even without explanation, you probably were able to figure out how this program works, but here's some extra information:

Every FORTRAN program starts with PROGRAM (followed by the program's name) and ends with END.  At the beginning of every program, one declares their variables, informing the computer how to label any data it manipulates.  In this case, we're playing with integers, but variables can be real numbers or even strings of text.  FORMAT tells the program how many digits the variables can have (in this case, up to five for entry, six for the total).

When a line starts with a "C", any comment (generally explanatory) may follow.  What a boon for error-checking ("debugging") that is!

If you are lucky enough to have direct keyboard access to the computer to enter ("READ") the numbers to be added, and a CRT monitor on which the computer can display ("WRITE") the results, the interaction after the program is run will take seconds.  If you have to enter information with punch cards and view the results via printer, things will take a bit longer (and the numbers in the parentheses will be different).  But that's a topic for another article.

The whole program takes just 10 lines, one of which is optional.  Sure, it's half again as long as the equivalent machine code, but it can add any two numbers rather than two pre-coded ones.

Not only that, but that thirty line Pythagorean equation program can be done in just ten lines, too!  That's because FORTRAN includes a SQRT (square root) command.  Better still, there are commands for every trigonometric function (SIN, ASIN, COS, ACOS, etc.) so with just a few more lines, you can also get information on any triangle using the Law of Sines and Law of Cosines. 

Now you can see just how powerful a programming language can be!

Robot Middleman

Every computer comes with a kind of translator already hardwired into its permanent memory.  Otherwise, it couldn't interpret (for example) 101 as "Add" and 111 as "Print".  But, as we've discussed, they are incredibly minimal.  For a computer to understand the language of FORTRAN, it has to be programmed with an extra translator called a compiler. 

The compiler is a program input into the computer in machine language, of course (how else could it understand it?), but once entered, the compiler can be run to translate any FORTRAN program.  The compiler will completely translate ("assemble") the FORTRAN commands into a machine language program and execute it. 

This process is not instantaneous, just as a conversation between two people using an interpreter requires extra time.  Moreover, the compiler-assembled program is generally not as efficiently written (i.e. it takes more lines of code) as one optimized for brevity by an expert human. 

But because one saves so much time coding in FORTRAN, and because a human machine language expert isn't needed, the result is a tremendous net increase in efficiency.  In fact, programmers have been 500% quicker in their coding as a result, and they can focus on the problem they are trying to solve rather than the daunting task of talking in ones and zeroes or some arcane machine language.  That's worth the small price in computing time inefficiency.

Programming for everyone

FORTRAN was the first "higher-level" programming language, but it was quickly joined by many others.  They include LISP ("LISt Processing"), COBOL ("COmmon Business-Oriented Language"), and ALGOL ("ALGOrithmic Language"), each with their own specialized vocabulary and capabilities.  Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that a computer that can't read a higher-level language is almost useless; it's no surprise that FORTRAN was developed less than a decade after ENIAC, the first computer, came on-line.

But, as amazing as all of these languages are, their usage remains daunting.  FORTRAN et. al. are very good for the applications they were designed for, but not terribly flexible for anything else.

What this means is that, while FORTRAN might be useful to a physicist for making mathematical calculations, and COBOL is great for a corporate engineer to automate inventory control, there is no language for general application.  No introductory computing language that one (say, a college student) might learn to familiarize oneself with the theory of higher-level programming.

Moreover, most people don't have direct access to a computer, which means laboriously using a keypunch machine to put holes in punchcards (with one line of code per card), giving the stack to a technician, and waiting who-knows-how-long to get a result. 

The stage has been set for a simpler, even higher-level programming language that will allow anyone to dive feet first into coding — and that's basically what we'll be talking about in the next article in this series.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 9, 1964] Shall We Gather At The River? (January 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

You Only Live Twice


Cover art by Richard Chopping

I trust that the spirit of the late Ian Fleming will forgive me for stealing the title of the last James Bond novel to be published during his lifetime. (Rumor has it that at least one more may be published posthumously.) Those evocative four words bring to mind the notion of life after death.

Since the dawn of consciousness, human beings have pondered the possibility of an afterlife. From reincarnation to oblivion, from Paradise to Gehenna, countless visions of an existence after death have filled the imaginations of poets, prophets, and philosophers.

But what about science fiction writers?

Few SF stories dealing with the subject come to mind. There are, of course, many tales of fantasy about survival beyond the grave, often comic versions of Heaven or terrifying visits to Hell. Science fiction, with its disdain for mysticism (despite a weakness for pseudo-scientific premises that are just as fantastic) generally ignores the question.


This 1962 novel is a rare exception.

It is remarkable, then, that almost half of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow consists of a novella with a large cast of characters who have all died and been resurrected, without the need for a supernatural explanation.


Cover art by George Schelling.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

In fact, a few of the other pieces in the magazine feature characters who may have died, and who may have come back to life, although these are more ambiguous than the lead story.

Day of the Great Shout, by Philip Jose Farmer


Illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

A man who knows he died finds himself alive, nude, hairless, in a young and healthy body, floating in empty space, surrounded on all sides by countless others in his condition. After falling through the void and having a dream about an encounter with God, he wakes up on a new world.

(The author never gives this planet a name. The fact that the stars are different, along with other details, make it clear that it's not Earth. For convenience, let's call it Riverworld, based on the most notable physical feature of the place.)

All around him are other naked, bald people, mostly in a state of panic. One can't blame them, since this afterlife doesn't resemble anything they imagined. When they calm down a bit, it becomes clear that they are now in the valley of a wide river, surrounded on both sides by impassible mountains. A curious device, obviously making use of extremely advanced technology, provides them with food, and even luxury items such as tobacco and lipstick.


A fellow who has an unfortunate encounter with the device proves that it's possible to die a second time.

By this time, we find out that our protagonist is the famous Victorian adventurer Richard Francis Burton. It might be a good idea to list the other characters who play major roles during his adventures on Riverworld.

Dramatis Personae, in order of appearance:

Monat Grrautuft, an alien who died on Earth during the Twenty-First Century.

Kazzintuitruuaabemss, an ape-man who died sometime during the dawn of humanity. Fortunately for the reader, he'll be called just Kazz for the rest of the story.


Kazz in battle.

Peter Frigate, a writer born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1918. If that sounds familiar, that's because his time and place of birth are identical with the author's. Given that he has the same initials, it's clear that's he meant as a fictionalized self-portrait. He died during the same incident that led to the death of the alien.

Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, the woman who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland.

Lev Ruach, a man who also died at the same time as Frigate and the alien. (It turns out that a grave misunderstanding between aliens and Earthlings led to both being wiped out. The main reason for this apocalyptic incident, I think, is so the author doesn't have to deal with people from the far future. Everyone who has ever died on Earth is now alive on Riverworld, so limiting the timescale from prehistory to the Twenty-First Century makes his job a little less daunting than it might be.)

Gwenafra, a seven-year-old girl who died in ancient Gaul. We find out later that children who died before the age of five are somewhere else, not specified.

These are just the good guys. After some time passes, given the nature of humanity, war and slavery develop on Riverworld. Burton and his companions battle the forces of the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering and Tullios Hostilios, a legendary king of Rome, long before it became a Republic and then an Empire.

After this violent conflict, our heroes find out that a man is not what he seems to be, and we learn something about the origin and purpose of Riverworld.


The discovery involves the ability of Kazz to see things that the others can't detect.

The premise is a fascinating one, and Farmer develops the setting in convincing detail. There's plenty of action, and a generous number of science fiction concepts to hold the reader's interest. My only complaint is that the story is open-ended, with Burton ready to continue exploring Riverworld. I suspect that a sequel or two is in the works, perhaps leading to a full novel.

An anticipatory four stars.

Field Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley

The first of two nonfiction articles in this issue imagines what the equipment used by an ordinary foot soldier of the near future might be like. Sensitive radar detects enemies, and small missiles of various kinds serve to identify and destroy targets. The author makes use of a couple of fictional characters to demonstrate the technology, enlivening a rather dry subject.

An interested three stars.

Retreat Syndrome, by Philip K. Dick


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Starts with a guy stopped for speeding in his futuristic vehicle. This mundane beginning soon turns weird as the fellow moves his hand through the dashboard of his one-wheeled car as if it weren't there. We're firmly in the territory that the author explored in previous works; what is reality?

Flashing back reveals that the man remembers killing his wife with a laser gun when she threatened to reveal plans for a revolution against Earth by colonists on Ganymede. His psychiatrist advises a visit to the woman, who is apparently alive and well on Earth.


Did this happen or not?

The guy thinks he's been brainwashed, and that he's not on Earth at all, but still on Ganymede. A mind-altering drug may be involved.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. The fellow winds up committing what promises to be an endless cycle of attempted murders that might not be real.

Touches of what Simone de Beavuoir might call (sexual) 'oppression' make reading an otherwise intriguing story uncomfortable. We're told that the woman intended to betray the revolution out of petty spite and female bitterness. Another direct quote from the protagonist:

Like all women she was motivated by personal vanity and wounded pride.

That's a pretty wide-sweeping indictment of half the human race, even if we accept the fact that the main character isn't in his right mind. Trying to ignore this unpleasant part of the story, I found it to be compelling, with one of the author's more accessible plots.

A slightly offended four stars.

The Pani Planet, by R. A. Lafferty


Illustration by Norman Nodel.

The commander of a military expedition on an alien planet dies. The only native inhabitant who bothers to speak to the humans offers to fix the broken man. Rejecting this as ridiculous, the new leader buries the dead officer, who treated the aliens decently, and initiates a new, harsher policy. You won't be surprised to find out that the deceased commander returns to life. Of course, not all is what it seems to be.

Typical for the author, this story combines whimsy with tragedy. There's comedy in the broken English of the alien, and the tale ends with a joke, but there's also torture and death. The details of the plot are gimmicky, but it's worth reading.

An ambiguous three stars.

Stella and the Moons of Mars, by Robert S. Richardson

Our second nonfiction article rehashes material that appeared in the December 1963 issue of the magazine. Once again, we go over the remarkable fact that Jonathan Swift seems to have predicted that Mars would prove to have two moons, long before they were discovered, in his satiric classic Gulliver's Travels. After talking about the history of the sighting of the satellites, and discussing their known and speculative properties, the article half-seriously suggests that Swift might have seen them through a telescope and slyly announced the fact in the pages of his book. At least the author is honest enough to admit that this hypothesis is impossible, given the limitations of telescopes in Swift's time. We learn a little about the moons of Mars, but the rest is old hat.

An overly familiar two stars.

The Dead Ones, by Sydney van Scyoc

Once again we have death and revival, of a sort. A man is horribly injured in an industrial accident, and is presumed to be near death. Not much later, he turns up perfectly fine. His son-in-law smells something fishy, and finds out the truth about the mysterious health care system of this future world. There's a twist ending you may see coming.

This story features some of the most implausible happenings I've ever read. First of all, you have to believe that one secretive company controls all health care. Secondly, you have to accept that nobody minds the fact that they experience loss of memory during routine physical exams. Thirdly, you have to presume that the hero is the only person who has ever questioned the fact that many people approach death from disease or injury, yet are completely healed right away in some unseen manner.

A skeptical two stars.

Manfire, by Theodore L. Thomas


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

The bizarre, and probably imaginary, phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion becomes a worldwide plague in the near future. (The author calls it pyrophilia, but that seems like a very misleading term. The victims of this horrible death certainly don't love it!) Governments make use of all possible resources in an attempt to solve the problem.

Off to secure the remains of a victim.

The United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare contacts an eccentric, reclusive genius to see if he can help.


Our hero.


A victim.

The fellow investigates things in his own way, eventually setting up a team of experts to work on the mystery from a strictly theoretical viewpoint.


He also makes sure that they have plenty of booze.

Other than some gruesome scenes of people being consumed by flames coming out of their bodies, and investigators collecting the grisly remains for study, there isn't much to this story other than the main character's method of attacking the problem. The point seems to be that throwing a bunch of highly intelligent people in a room and having them come up with speculative hypotheses is superior to the methodical collection of data. I'm not sure I agree with that, since both are important. The explanation for the rise in spontaneous combustion reveals some ingenuity on the part of the author, but is rather anticlimactic.

A disappointed two stars.

Can These Bones Live?

Like people, most stories have a limited lifetime. A lucky few gain something like immortality, reprinted in anthologies that survive when others fade away. The two authors named Philip have a good chance of seeing their creations resurrected from the pages of the magazine, into new bodies in the form of books. The other writers, maybe not as much. Only time can tell, and, like the afterlife, nobody really knows anything about the future.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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